Romeo is Bleeding

18

There seemed to be a glut of these film noir adjacent films in the early nineties. Lots of corrupt cops, voiceovers, femme fatales, bags of cash, murder and mayhem. Romeo is Bleeding reads very particularly 1993 in this regard. I saw it in the theater and recall being very excited for all the grit and grime and Gary Oldman of it all. After his turn as Dracula and, subsequently, one of the best of this genre at the time, 1993’s True Romance. All of which I saw in the theater and lived in what had to be the awesome renaissance of movie making. After seeing the trailer for this film, I was sure this would be the best movie I’d ever seen. Gunplay and car chases and sexy women. Everything a young man might want in his cinema.

I look back and think that perhaps I was blinded by my youthful exuberance. I recall really digging it, though, and at some juncture renting the LaserDisc and making myself a VHS copy — which is still in Casa del Hipster somewhere. It fit in my dark noir canon, along with films like Shallow Grave and Killing Zoe. If there were guns and twisty intrigue, I was game. Some, in retrospect, are decent. Others, upon rewatch, don’t quite hold up to the obvious lack of scrutiny that I didn’t employ upon exiting the Carousel Mall multiplex. This thing is kind of a mess. A bit of a student film with a bigger budget based solely on the lack of logic and almost chronic case of continuity issues. I sense a ton of cocaine just lingering in the background, but I have absolutely no proof of this. Other than it feels like Hollywood was rife with these “fuck it, moving on, we’ll fix it in post” tooth-grinding decision making. Look, this film is over 30 years old at this point, so I don’t mind spoiling some things. Though, like a lot of noir films, we start the film at the end, so we already know where Oldman’s Jack ends up. And then he kind of narrates his story via voiceover looking back on all the ways he fucked up. So, spoilers are just part of the thing.

The first thing I noticed this time around — and something that became very relevant in the years just following this film — is the way Oldman dances. The score is voiced in a very noir way, including a jazz soundtrack that smacks of the 40s. To this end, Oldman’s character dances to unheard jazz, both alone and with his wife, Natalie (Annabella Sciorra). He dances exactly like the mid-90s SIMS characters. A game that became very relevant in those times. But his stiff-armed, not-on-beat swaying has to be where those animations come from. It’s uncanny. And then there’s Oldman’s side-piece, Sheri. Played by a nineteen-year-old Juliette Lewis. An 17-year age difference that I suppose — based on most 1940s-era films — was apparently totally fine. Lewis’ “New York” accent is absolutely hilarious. And completely unnecessary. I think she’s supposed to be an abuse victim, but is basically being abused by Oldman, who puts her on a subway “out of town” to protect her at one point. Which, again, is totally stupid, as subways don’t leave NYC. I guess they couldn’t shoot at Grand Central or something and just decided that throwing her on the 1 train wouldn’t set off any alarms in 90% of the non-NYC audience. Anyway, his relationship with her and our eventual femme fatale, Mona Demarkov (Lena Olin), makes Jack seem like such a horny biatch. He’s not around her more than thirty seconds before he starts licking his lips and trying to grab that business. Which I suppose he sets up in his original voiceover, but it’s cringey the way he is so ruled by his libido. Like a cartoon wolf.

Meanwhile Oldman is doing some accent work of his own. Pronouncing the word “first” as “foist” and whatnot. His is certainly better than some others, but definitely skews a bit heavy-handed at times. Honestly, I’m not even sure how to proceed with this. Okay, short synopsis. Jack is a dirty cop. He doesn’t want to live like a schnook anymore, so he makes a deal with the mob that he’ll tell them where mob rats are being held so they can go kill them before they can turn state’s evidence. Stupidly, these witnesses keep dying, yet the FBI or whomever keep putting them up in the same crappy hotel in the same room. It makes absolutely no sense. Also, these are the dumbest cops and feds ever to live. They don’t realize Jack is the mole and don’t seem overly interested in figuring out who is for most of the film. Meanwhile he keeps banking cash, putting it in a hole in his backyard. All while carrying on affairs and generally being terrible at his day job. Thing is the mob is the mob. And at one point — despite giving them good info many times — his info doesn’t pay off and the mob turns on him. Again, this makes no sense. To show them they’re serious, they literally show up at the funeral of one of their mobster buddies turned informant (where they know there are FBI and cops surveilling because he was a murdered mob informant) and grab him and cut off one of his toes. Right there out in the open in the cemetery. Sure. And, in one of many oddball continuity issues, Jack ends up with blood all over his face afterwards for some reason. Despite them cutting off his toe. Which, last time I checked, is at the other end of his body. He then goes home, puts his girlfriend on the aforementioned subway and tells his wife he fucked up but that he promises he’s put a deposit on a new gas barbecue. A gas barbecue? He has hundreds of thousands of dollars in a hole and he’s like putting a grill on layaway? Like it’s something fancy and she’s going to be so impressed she’s going to want to stay with a crooked cop who has apparently slept with half of NYC?

Okay, I said I’d do the plot, but there’s so much insane stuff here that is not plot-driven that it’s making it very hard to focus. Mostly the fact that none of the other detectives he hangs out with notice what a sketchy dude Jack is. Always vanishing, clearly compromised. Showing up with unexplained bruises, missing toes, bloody clothes, etc. They all shrug at his constant flop sweat and clearly obvious questions about where they might be stashing the next mob informant. They are terrible detectives. There is just so much to nit-pick here. There is the fact the dude who is Jack’s mob connection seemingly lives in an abandoned squat in Queens? Is this what working for the mob gets you? And then there’s the shooting and live burial of a mob boss (Roy Scheider doing his best Fat Tony impression) right next to a bridge under the windows of hundreds of apartments buildings. Literally standing out in an open area digging a ditch for hours and throwing a body into it with thousands of eyes on them. Cool shot, 0% reality. There is also the most memorable scene in the film where Mona, after being shot in the leg and thrown unconscious into the back of a car, regains her wits and cackles like a loon as she scissors Jack’s neck with her legs from the backseat while he’s driving. There is more blood than any human body could possibly expel. He ends up wearing that bloody shirt for days, walking around the city with not a second glance. He even goes home at one point to grab a photo book that his wife had been putting together, but for some unknown reason doesn’t grab a fresh shirt or take a quick shower. Meanwhile, Mona is off cutting off her own arm to make it seem like she was dead by using his little girlfriend, Sheri, as bait (who must have realized too late that the subway will just send you in a big circle) in one of the most convoluted and silly framing jobs in movie history. She literally sets Jack up to accidentally murder Sheri, cuts off Sheri’s arm, replaces it with her own arm and torches the building Sheri’s body is in. First, she couldn’t have known that Jack would accidentally kill her. The way Mona makes it happen had like a one-in-one-million chance of working. Then replacing just an arm makes no sense. Were the cops supposed to think that Mona was dead? That’s what we were supposed to believe. Then she basically blackmails Jack and tells him — I think — that she’ll tell the cops that he’s a murderer for presumably killing Sheri. So which body are the cops supposed to think is in the burned building? If they happen to only check the left arm (which they’d clearly realize was severed with a saw), they’d think it was Mona. Which is not a thing that would happen. But if they checked the teeth and the rest of the body, it’s Sheri. It’s all completely nonsensical. Basically Mona cut off her own arm for absolutely no reason. Other than to create the scene later on when she asks Jack if he wants to have sex with her prosthetic on or off.

Anyway, later on Jack ends up chummy with Mona, despite the fact she murdered many people, including cops and his girlfriend. It’s confusing. At least his shirt — which was bloody for all the scenes before it — is miraculously clean when he, once again, dances like a SIMS character with Mona at a bar. Dude can’t resist her, I guess. Which becomes even more obvious when he’s set up by her and his own cop friends in the end. Because I guess nabbing a dirty cop is better than a professional assassin, who has murdered feds, cops and civilians alike? And when they allow the two of them to have a confrontation in the court house that never would be allowed — her walking free and him in cuffs — I couldn’t imagine what was happening. It’s not the real world, I realize, but one where there is video game logic and everyone is just a little bit crooked. But, yeah, they let him handle things. And, once again, he ends up with blood on his face despite there being blood nowhere near him. It’s like they invested in a drum of fake blood and just had to get rid of it before the film wrapped.

And then we’re back where we started. In an abandoned diner somewhere out west. Jack is alone and finally looks at that photo book we’d been seeing his wife contribute to. Apparently the woman is a professional photographer. Despite the fact we’re led to believe she’s using only a Polaroid camera. Nope, there are detective-level photos of all of Jack’s affairs. Taken with long lenses and action shots and through windows and whatnot. All the women named and placed on pages — including one, I believe who is her own niece. I have to assume these were not taken with the Polaroid we see her using, but with the continuity and unreality of this film, I wouldn’t put it past them to ask us to believe these are Polaroids. But here is Jack ultimately living like the schnook he feared he’d end up living like, alone and in witness protection with a book to remind him that his wife will never be coming back despite his dreams. Honestly, though, if she’d tracked all of these affairs and had been peeping on him for years through her telephoto Polaroid, why was she sticking around? Dude was a horny douche who was both a bad human and a bad cop. Plus, he dances like an absolute bot. Turns out this movie is more about her and her bad choices than it is about Jack and what can happen when you get yourself entangled with a psychopathic Swedish (nee Russian) former Miss Scandinavia.